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The Cross Carries Us as Much as We Carry It

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Sorrow casts its shadow on all corners of this world. Joy can equally do the  same;  we live in a world where both are present.  Some mourn; some rejoice. Sometimes crying and laughter  aren’t   very far  apart.    Jesus was God in the flesh and as we read in the Gospels there were times when Jesus was full of joy and sorrow. This is reality and  God embraces it for what it is. He did not hide when He was experiencing either sensation . This is  encouraging;  we can also be honest about  life  too .  In our  culture,  we often want to diminish grief and  only focus on happiness. We construct theologies that become  magical . We  try to bend reality to the will of the  one that  inv okes the “right words ”.  Yet,  after all of the  manifesting  both sacred and secular that we try, reality is reality. Babies die, people are murdered, wars ravage the earth.  We ...
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On a Knife's Edge

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The  words “The  Kingdom of God ”  sound far away and otherworldly  to many of us . For  a lot of   people  this  phrase  translates to  “Hea ven ”;  it is only about a world outside of this one.  We  don’t  think it is something immediate  or available  for us now.    Yet Jesus means something  very different  from this idea. N.T. Wright says this:   The gospels are all about ‘the kingdom of God ’,  and God’s kingdom or kingship  isn’t  about another world to which we might escape from this present one. God’s  kingdom is precisely his ‘in-charge-ness’ ... The point was not that people would  leave this world and go somewhere called ‘heaven’ instead, but that the life, the  love  and the power of ‘heaven ’,  of God’s domain, would become a reality here on  earth.   1   What does this mean in a practical sense for those of us wh...
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Staring into the Sun

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  See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God. (1 John 3:1 NRSV)   When we call God “Father ”,  we have an entire background and tradition behind this description.  Many of us have grown up praying to God as our Father (“Father God ”,  “Heavenly Father”  etc.).   It is easy to take for granted that , although having some precedent in the Hebrew Bible, this  was a  revolutionary concept !   It was like an explosion going off in the ancient world a long with the  proclamation of  the Good  News   during the first decades of the church. If we halt and  ruminate over this idea, it can open so many rusty doors in our minds and displace our misconceptions of who God really is.    For many of us, our first instinct concerning God  is  fear or dread.  Much of this may be our inherent alienation  from  God due to our natural bent as broken rebels. Some...
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